Microscopic view of the engineered bone with an opening exposing the internal trabecular bony network, overlaid with colored images of blood cells and a supportive vascular network that fill the open spaces in the bone marrow-on-a-chip. Credit: James Weaver, Harvard’s Wyss Institute.
Laboratory animals have been an essential part of biomedical research for a long time, serving as a platform for experiments that cannot be done in other ways. Specifically, testing of how tissues are affected by various environmental factors, therapies, and drugs requires access to the tissues themselves. Researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have reported in Nature Methods on the development of a ‘bone marrow-on-a-chip’ that, for the first time, serve as an effective non-animal testing platform of bone marrow tissue.
Mice were still used to engineer the starting bone material, which was then removed from the animal and placed inside a microfluidic device where it was perfused with a culture medium.
Here are the researchers behind the project discussing the new technology:
Study in Nature Methods: Bone marrow–on–a–chip replicates hematopoietic niche physiology in vitro
Wyss Institute: Bone marrow-on-a-chip unveiled…